It is a journey from outcast to apologist, one that has taken Russia's most famous living writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, across the savage excesses of the last century. He began this journey a lone 50s dissident, consigned by the Soviet state to the numbing brutality of the Gulag, the sharp end of what he would later call the "meat-grinder" of Soviet repression.

But yesterday, in a rare written interview with the Moskovski Novosti newspaper, he was the epitome of political orthodoxy. He emerged from the elite dacha complex where he now lives to mount a nationalistic defence of the Kremlin at a time when western criticism of its democratic record is at a high.

The former Gulag zek (inmate), who once memorised his prison writings to avoid being punished if his papers were confiscated, delivered a savage critique of the United States and Vladimir Putin's predecessors that mimicked much of the current Kremlin's thinking.

Solzhenitsyn, now 87, bitterly attacked the US for "occupying" Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq for years. "Russia poses no threat [but] Nato is methodically and persistently building up its military machine - into the east of Europe and surrounding Russia from the south," he said.

He was broadly positive about Mr Putin, and said Russia's current problems were mostly the fault of his predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. He said that under Mr Putin "efforts have begun to be made to salvage the statehood that has been in a mess. But owing to the heavy burden left by [Mr Putin's predecessors], an awful, awful lot in Russia has yet to be lifted up from decline."

He added that Mr Putin's foreign policy - seen by many as increasingly anti-western - was "conducted sensibly and ever more forward-thinking".

At a time when American and European officials are repeatedly questioning Mr Putin's commitment to democracy, Solzhenitsyn said: "Present-day western democracy is in a serious state of crisis." He said Russia should not "thoughtlessly imitate" these democracies but look after its own people.

It is a measure of how far he has travelled since he stepped off a plane in Vladivostok in May 1994. Twenty years after being exiled for his criticism of the Brezhnev regime, he returned from America to a Russian political scene dominated by oligarchs, fraught with economic chaos, and with a looming war in Chechnya and the emergence of the mafia.

He was greeted by overtures from Mr Yeltsin, but the poverty and chaos he had seen in his journey across this supposedly new and free Russia meant Solzhenitsyn lost little time in panning the "pseudo-democracy" of the Yeltsin Kremlin, dubbing the free-market economic reforms as "brainless". While his criticisms began to chime painfully with Russia's jobless and hungry, his patriotism struggled to find a home.

Yet Mr Putin was quick to welcome the 1970 winner of the Nobel prize for literature into the political mainstream. Indeed, the writer, often seen as a passionate democrat because of his opposition to the Soviet authorities, shared many beliefs with the authoritarian Putin administration.

Yesterday's interview touched on a burning issue in Russia, that of the growing xenophobia that has led to dozens of attacks on foreigners so far this month, at least six of which were fatal. He warned against condemning all nationalism: a little was needed, he said, to stop ethnic Russians from dying out.